Tibetan Monasteries

(c) 2014 Karl Ryavec, Tibetan Buddhist Resource Center, CHGIS

License:  Creative Commons - Attribution Non-Commerical Share Alike
Details: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/
free unlimited use for academic research.
no commercial use, resale, or redistribution permitted.

Publication Date: 2016
Draft Date:  Mar 2013
Revised:  Feb 2014
Editor:  Lex Berman
POC:  chgis@fas.harvard.edu

------------------------------------

Citation:   "Tibetan Monasteries and Printeries,"  Edited by Karl Ryavec, Lex Berman, Chris Tomlinson, Jeff Wallman. 2016.
------------------------------------


Compilation notes:

This dataset contains the point locations of Tibetan "gompa" or Monasteries established throughout history and over the greater Tibetan cultural region.

The original version of the files were compiled by Karl Ryavec leading up to the publication of the Historical Atlas of Tibet (U Chicago, 2015).

This particular dataset can be considered a fork, or variant of this research, which was worked on by the Tibetan Buddhist Resource Center, in order to create a canonical online database of the historical monasteries, and assign them unique Geographic Identifiers for the purposes of Linked Open Data.

To this end, TBRC recruited the assistance of Lex Berman at CHGIS, who normalized the source files (not in the same tabular formats) and compiled them into two versions:

a)  the first version was a tabular dataset compiled by Berman in which all of the records were normalized and contextualized (with their parent jurisdictions).

Version 1 of the dataset is found in: Tibet_Monasteries_TBRC_V1_2013.zip

Version 1 was then passed to TBRC for them to correlate with their existing database of monastery locations

b)  the second version of the data was generated by exporting from the TBRC database and supplemented the original records with Geographic Identifiers associated with all the monastery records, names of the Monasteries in Tibetan, Chinese, and Wylie Transliteration forms, and a designation of each monastery as either a MAJOR or MINOR.

The second version was then passed back to Lex Berman, who processed them into separate layers for Major and Minor monasteries, and generated the URLs to the canonical pages for each monastery record on the TBRC website.

Version 2 is found in:  Tibet_Monasteries_TBRC_V2_2014.zip

These layers represent a working Linked Open Dataset, and they can be browsed as map layers on the TibetMap:

https://worldmap.harvard.edu/maps/tibet

and any single monastery object can be queried (clicked on) to find the GID in TBRC system, such as:  G3JT12553

Direct links were also embedded in the shapefiles, allowing the user to proceed to the TRBC canonical record:

http://tbrc.org/#!rid=G3JT12553

Note, the TRBC system also had identified more than 200 historical Printeries, and these were processed in the same fashion.

